It's Gone All Gordon

Hugo Rifkind wrote an excellent article in The Times (£) about Gordon Brown's evidence at the Leveson Enquiry this week. He compares Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's views on the press, views that expose the two men's very different outlook.

Tony Blair thought back then — and doubtless still thinks — that the British press was awful. “Of course the accuracy of a story counts,” he said. “But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be, but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.”

It’s a fairly devastating critique, this, painting the press as irresponsible and amoral; a nihilistic force of mob-handed destruction. In the wake of phone hacking and everything else, this does not seem inaccurate. But this is not what Gordon Brown thinks at all. He sees a press that is not amoral, but immoral. Or, to put it another way, Tony Blair would say that the press tore apart Gordon Brown because he was rubbish, because it was fun, because it was just so damn easy, because a mindless sort of group-think took hold and ordinary humanity flew out the window. Whereas Gordon Brown thinks it happened because two or three powerful men, for ideological or commercial reasons, entered into a conspiracy to get rid of him.

I would argue that this isn't just how Gordon Brown thinks but how many on the left think. The left sees News International as a political opponent (at least since its papers swapped sides) not as a news outfit whose failings are the same as other media operators. They genuinely believe that News International is in league with the Tories and out to get them.

It is this paranoid political outlook, allied with the commercial opportunism on the part of Murdoch's competitors, that has led to the unjustifiable amount of media coverage that Leveson and any Murdoch related story gets. Rifkind concludes...

“Attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment,” said Tony Blair in 2007. “It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.”

Quite. The Leveson Inquiry was born out of a sudden public awareness that print media had terrible problems. I’m not going to play those problems down. But they were Tony Blair problems, not Gordon Brown problems; problems about process, not motive. All the way through, I’ve had a sense of lawyers looking for problems with motive and simply not finding them. And thus, what started seven months ago (seven months!) as a righteous autopsy into grotesque wrongs done to ordinary folk has become a whirlwind of innuendo about whether the sidekicks of media bosses and Cabinet ministers are sending each other the right sort of text message.

This is why it’s getting boring. It’s gone weird. It’s gone Gordon.

My favourite comment under this article is from Stephanie Bennett...

"A politician complaining about the press is like a sailor complaining about the sea". - Enoch Powell

Minor Mistakes and Little White Lies

So, the News International flagellation continues unabated. There's no sign that their competitors or politicians want to focus on other media organisations that we know have been at least equally guilty of using dubious information gathering methods, so it's not going to move on any time soon. But I note that the anti-News International lobby have a new bit of spin.

It's a cunning line, based on the reported words of Rupert Murdoch in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Murdoch, referring to News Corp's handling of the crisis since it broke, said they'd handled it well with only and few "minor mistakes". I've now seen this has been reinterpreted by some (BBC reporters and Labour politicians, including John Prescott, so far) as meaning the accusations against the News of the World (such as the accessing of Milly Downler's voicemails) were minor mistakes. Clever. There will be many that may disagree that News Corp have handled the crisis well with only a few minor mistakes, but no one would agree that the accusations regarding the accessing of innocent private individuals' voicemails, including victims of crime, are minor mistakes. Indeed, it's a line that, had he actually said it, would add to the public outrage and focus it more sharply on Rupert Murdoch himself. Which is, of course, their agenda.

After Gordon Brown's dodgy claims regarding The Sun this week we can see that the, mostly politically motivated, anti-News International campaign is resorting to lies and smears to progress it's agenda. It may seem like natural justice for the press, and I wouldn't be too bothered, if it wasn't for the fact that all this energy is being focused on one organisation, mostly because it upset a political party when it turned it's back on them. The worry is the wider problem in the press generally won't be addressed. What we need is the same tenacious focus on The Mirror, People, Mail etc. No one seriously suggests they've not been using similar methods as the News of the World. It will be interesting to see if Labour MPs maintain the same level of passion and indignation and the BBC continue wall to wall news coverage, when the story moves on to the non-News International papers and, God forbid, Labour papers like the Mirror and People.

Hoist By His Own Petard?

Now we've had the politicians express their, rather hypocritical, disgust at the behaviour of News International, perhaps we can move on to the real, broader issue of press ethics generally? The Mirror, Mail, People, in fact almost all of them, have been involved in questionable activities.

If anything good can come of this epiphenominal imbroglio it will be a shift in the taste of tabloid readers, away from the salacious tittle-tattle that they now know is gathered using illicit and morally dubious methods.

A rather amusing and ironic consequence of such a change in demand would be less work for the likes of Max Clifford, one of the most vocal celebrity phone hack victims.




What a shame that would be.